Saturday, 12 May 2012

Ripper, Mate

I had some reason for painting them grey, but I can't remember it.

Some terrain and a couple of GW Rippers I painted shortly before I left. I've got them set up here for a test game of Throwdown. You will notice that I have sliced up my Zuzzy mat and mounted it onto 2mm MDF board sections (Custom made for me by the excellent warbases.co.uk) ... This is Throwdown's Close Quarters Battle map system, where you "carve out" playable area with tiles and add terrain. It is excellent for representing interiors or just choked streets, canyons or thick jungle. It packs up real small too. :)

This lot cost $90. Insane.

Today I managed to take a trip into the city to shop for supplies (and a mother's day gift as a sub objective). I was a bit taken aback by the prices of everything at Hobbyco, and ended up at the Sydney GW store.
The Staff were very friendly and not at all aggressive when I told them I was painting 15mm. The store manager took a lot of time to help me with the new fangled paint system. Hilariously it has a 3 shade arrangement that is designated by game-fluff words, so is totally unintelligible to me.

I'm looking forward to trying some of the new types of paint, but I only bought the exact colors I would need for my next non-Khurasan batch of figures. Can you guess what they are based on the colours shown? Oh and I forget to get yellow, dammit.

I have to ride to my sister's place for mother's day tomorrow, and I'm still waiting for brushes and bases from em-4 before I can start painting. And I just remembered that I don't have any basing materials, knife or files. I miss my kit!

Very nice! Funnily enough, I was talking to my buddy about cutting up my zuzzy matt last night. I have a 3x3, and I was thinking about cutting it into 1 foot squares... anything I should watch out for?

It's not exactly easy. You can make cuts with a very sharp xacto, but if you need to trim the edges it won't work.. I used scissors for final adjustments. The main reason I love Zuzzy mat is that if a figure tips over on it, they are less likely to get scratched or chipped bouncing off the latex than sand/pva.. otherwise I'd model my own. :)

It's not so much the cost-per-pot of the GW stuff, it's the cost in terms of volume. How much paint is in one of those posts now? The ones I bought a year or so ago have 12ml in them. Today I picked up eight pots of Derivan acrylics from my local art shop - apparently they're designed for miniatures, and I'm interested to see how they pan out given that they are 36ml pots and cost about A$6.50 each. Unfortunately I was told that the range has been discontinued, so if they're any good I'm going to have to stock up now.

I do like paints that I can go to a local store to buy; that way I can stock up easily when I run out, and see what I'm buying. It's really the reason I've stuck by GW paints for so long; they're expensive, but so long as I live in a major population centre I can get what I need at a moment's notice.

That's pretty expensive for paint. To be fair I have heard that gaming over there can be expensive, I'm sure I heard that a lot of Flames of War players over there used to get their stuff from Maelstrom, as it was worth the wait as it was cheaper, despite being manufactured in New Zealand.

Yes. The GW guy told me they cost the same worldwide, and I replied that paid £1.80 for my last pot.. He went on to say you have to take into account the distance they travel. Which is basically nonsense, but I guess he has to say something. It's not the shop guy's fault so I left it at that.

I'm glad to see you posting again. Sorry to hear about the cost of paint in Oz. I just switched over to Reaper Paints after the GW switcheroo. Sucks to be without your gear, I hope it gets to you soon. I think the Rippers look great.

I've been playing with the new GW paints quite a bit. The white base is handy, some colors are nice, however mostly seems like a marketing thing to me, then any real initiative in paint design, which they give you the pleasure of paying more for them! The real annoyance is the dry brush paints. It's thicker...however you need to still dab it on paper, so in fact its just thick paint and you can achieve the same from any other paint!

I got them mostly because it was easy to go into town and buy them. I prefer dropper bottles because of the tiny amounts of paint I tend to use, but I was a big fan of both the old foundation paints and the washes. 50% of my paint setup is vallejo.

We'd be rich if we went into the paint business, and our triads don't need clever names, it could be: Light Blue, Blue, Dark Blue. I miss normal names in my paints.

As for paint prices, they are what they are I guess. I was using cheap craft paints for a while, but they're just not the same. Of course, I've painted three figures for all of 2012, so that makes the paint stretch far, haha.